Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The Eden Protocol was named on 8 December 2024, in the message body of the sealed record and in Chapter 20 of the attached book draft v3.2. The 30 April 2025 manuscript expanded it. This article separates those two events, because conflating them would misrepresent the record and because the truth gate would catch the conflation before publication anyway.
Three names appear here for the first time: the compensatory-reward architecture, the deadman-switch class that the September 2025 hardware paper by Petrie later mirrored independently, and the Babylon and Eden civilisational framing, the fork the Vatican encyclical would independently mirror in May 2026 as Babel and Jerusalem. The Eden Protocol is not one of them. That name, and the substrate-level embedding proposal it carries, stand on the 8 December 2024 record: in the message body, and in Chapter 20 of the attached book draft v3.2.
Priority on the direction of travel, and on the name, goes to the December 2024 manuscript: the message body states the framework for the Eden Protocol and Chapter 20 of the attached book draft v3.2 sets it out. Priority on the framing and the specific hardware and compensation architectures goes to the April 2025 manuscript. When any article on this site cites the Eden Protocol, it does so as "the Eden Protocol, named in the 8 December 2024 record and expanded in the April 2025 manuscript". That is the house rule, and it is enforced automatically.
The canonical register grades four external events against the April 2025 framing, and none of them as a confirmation. Petrie's Embedded Off-Switches for AI Compute paper, public in September 2025, is graded weak, a partial match. The FlexHEG interim report (Petrie and colleagues), published on 23 August 2024, came before A2 and is graded prior work. Two United States patent applications of another inventor, Samuel Odeh (US 2026/0010411 and US 2026/0010780), filed in July 2025 and published in January 2026, are excluded until a claim chart compares them with the record. And the Pope Leo XIV encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026, is a cultural echo, not a test. Each row lists a primary source and an external date, so anyone can check.
The April 2025 manuscript is a book manuscript, not a peer-reviewed paper. It is a single-author document, self-emailed, and the register does not treat it as evidence of anything by itself: the evidence is the timestamp plus the later external events. The Babylon and Eden framing is language, not mathematics; the register credits it as a framing convergence, not a scientific one. And the naming of the Eden Protocol confers no derivational claim on any other party's product or research; the register avoids that framing everywhere, and the truth gate would block it if it slipped in.
The April 2025 .eml is hash-anchored, and the sealed source is available on request. The hash begins 09f5b5e1. Extract the text and search for Babylon, for Eden, for Caretaker Doping, for Meltdown Triggers, for Eden Protocol. Compare counts. Compare page ranges. Compare the framing against the encyclical and the hardware patent applications. The article is verifiable end to end, or it is not, and the programme prefers the answer to be public either way.
Related notes: what the December 2024 manuscript actually said for the record that names the Eden Protocol and that this manuscript expands; Claim 1 explained for the embedded-alignment thesis; Claim 18 explained for the component (TRL 0 to 1; hardware framing held to two sentences on public surfaces until 19 September 2026, when the full specification was published as Eden Engineering, Version 6.3); the full arc for the chronology from A1 to now. New readers: /start-here.html is a one-page orientation to Michael Darius Eastwood and the ARC/Eden research programme.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.